Thursday, March 21, 2013

Medical mystery

This past
Wednesday night, my throat started to feel funny. Thursday, it hurt…by Thursday
night, I was questioning whether I’d be able to go to California Dreamin’, the very first Southern
California Romance Writers of America conference. Friday morning I ditched
working out with my trainer (which would’ve been at 5:45 am), got up and 7 am,
and started packing…still wondering whether I should go. In the end, I did.

My throat
hurt like hell. I hoped I wasn’t infectious. I checked my temperature both
Thursday night and Friday morning, and it was normal.

My friend
and roomie Christine, whom I was
carpooling to the conference with, said pffft,
she wouldn’t miss the conference unless she was outright throwing up.

Alrighty
then!

Despite
feeling rather like poo, I had a wonderful time. Great workshops, great people.
On the way there, Christine commented that she was craving Chinese, so I found
a local place with good reviews on Yelp. It was 2.2 miles away. She said,
that’s close enough, let’s walk.

Alrighty
then.

Did I
mention that the place was in a strip mall in the dodgy area of town?

The food
turned out to be surprisingly decent – the chicken was all white meat, and the
cabbage in the noodles was firm and tasted fresh. The orange sauce was tasty
with a very slight kick. Two thumbs up for that.

Of course,
then we had to walk back. And it was starting to get dark. And the cops had
pulled someone over in our path – at least three cop cars…

I’d worn my Vibrams, but
they were my everyday Vibrams, not the ones I have for
working out. They’re older, and I don’t normally wear them for power
walking. So I had blisters on the bottoms
of my feet by the time we god back. We did stop in an AM/PM so I could by cough
drops for my throat (they didn’t have lozenges, so I settled for cough drops)
and Band-Aids. Christine bought cough medicine and Nyquil because she was
getting over a cold. We were partying hard, I tell ya.

We drank
maybe half a bottle of wine and went to bed early that night.

Saturday
night she had dinner with her soon-to-be editor, so she was all abuzz. I’d
picked up a burrito from Rubio’s across the street and eaten it in our room,
since I felt like crap. My throat kept swelling so it was hard to swallow (no
issues with breathing), and always felt like there was something caught in it.
But then she came back from dinner and was all bouncy and we finished off the
bottle of wine and opened the second bottle and finished that, and at 9:45 pm she said, “We need more wine.”

“We don’t
have any more wine,” I pointed out. So I checked online when the bar closed.

That would
be at 10 pm.

We were in
our jammies.

So we threw
on clothes and raced down and ordered a glass of wine each and some garlic
parmesan fries (because with that much wine in us, we weren’t thinking “healthy,”
we were thinking “sop up the booze”), and discovered people we knew were still
there, including the gorgeous Kate
Wood, so we moved over to that table, and we all talked and talked and we
ordered a glass each more wine, and finally it was nearly 11 pm and the bar
staff probably loathed us, so we paid and left. (Although they forgot to charge
us for the second two glasses of wine, which we pointed out to them so they
could fix the bill, so maybe they don’t loathe us completely.)

Funny thing:
My throat didn’t hurt when I was drinking wine. WHY??? Both days, I had the
misfortune to sneeze during a workshop, and it hurt so incredibly much that
tears sprang to my eyes and it was all I could do not to cry our in pain.

Sunday was
more workshops and lunch, and then a big book signing. I sold out of Waking the Witch,
which had been ordered through Barnes & Noble, who admittedly didn’t order
very many and I had people disappointed because they would have bought it, so
phooey. I brought copies of three other books (two collections and a long short
story), and they sold respectably. I still made way more on the others than Waking the Witch, so there was no benefit to going through B&N.
Lesson learned.

Meanwhile,
because I’d been walking funny due to the blisters on the bottom of my feet, my
dressy
shoes had rubbed a horrid blister on the back of one ankle. As in, a layer
of skin had peeled off. (Sorry…)

And my
throat hurt. And my ears hurt. Ugh.

Ken had come
to the book signing (he’d been at an SCA event that weekend) and his mom came,
too, which was fantastic! On the way home, though, I asked Ken to take me to an
urgent care. Advil and cough drops and gargling with warm salt water weren’t
helping; I needed bigger guns.

Apparently I
was a medical mystery. If I had other symptoms (sniffles, coughing), it would
be a virus. Nope, otherwise I felt great. If I had a fever, then it was
probably strep. Nope – plus the in-house culture came back negative. So they
took a culture to send out, and the doctor said to get proper lozenges and
Aleve, and to gargle with salt water. Thanks.
I have since learned that Aleve does nothing for me, and that spray stuff for
sore throats? I can never seem to hit the back of my throat where it hurts. The
lozenges help, but mostly just make my tongue numb.

Monday, I
skipped my workout, and had a complete and utter stressy meltdown in the
evening. Tuesday, I realized I was feeling better. Wednesday, I felt fantastic:
I worked out, got a ton of stuff done. I still took Nyquil, though, because now
I was coughing and feeling a wee tiny bit sniffly.

Today the
doctor called. I have strep. Hellloooo, antibiotics. I’m contagious until 24
hours after I started taking them (which was 3:30 pm or so today), which means
I was Patient Zero at the conference, and have potentially infected everyone
else I’ve come into contact with. If you are one of those people, and you get
sick, I am deeply, deeply sorry.

I’m taking
tomorrow off from working out, too, so I don't infect my trainer (if I haven’t
already, eep), but I should be fine after that.

Okay, back
to work. I have some brain left….

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About Me

DAYLE A. DERMATIS has been called “one of the best writers working today” by USA Today bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith. Under various pseudonyms (and sometimes with coauthors), she’s sold several novels and more than 100 short stories in multiple genres. She lives and works in California within scent of the ocean, and in her spare time follows Styx around the country and travels the world, all of which inspires her writing. She loves music, cats, Wales, TV, magic, laughter, and defying expectations. To find out where she is today, check out www.DayleDermatis.com.